Afghanistan: ‘Our freedoms are dead — it’s like a TV screen going blank’

As the Taliban discover snooker, cappuccinos and the Apple store, the undercurrent of fear is palpable on the once-vibrant streets of Kabul.

Taliban fighters patrol on a vehicle outside Kabul International Airport in Kabul. Picture: AFP

The sign on the glass door of Slice Cafe read: “No guns”. Two Taliban with Kalashnikovs on their backs pushed it open and ordered cappuccinos from the Italian coffee machine. The manager, Zabiullah, said nothing, because he was pleased to have some custom. Last time I was there, 18 months earlier, its two floors had been crowded with young men and women, working on laptops and discussing their studies, films and tech start-ups like young people anywhere. Now it was almost empty. There was not a woman to be seen.

“When young people come now, the only thing they discuss is leaving the country,” said Zabiullah, 28.

“It’s hard to put in words the sadness we feel. All the progress and freedoms of the last 20 years gone, just like that. It’s like when your TV screen goes blank.”

Three weeks into Taliban rule, people in Kabul are still in shock. There was similar despondency a few streets away at VIP Salon, which offers haircuts such as a “Cristiano Ronaldo” or a “Justin Bieber”. Its owner, Murtaza Sultani, 19, fashionably quiffed, was sitting in checked shirt, jeans and Nike trainers, watching Fast & Furious on his phone. Only one customer had braved the salon that day. “We used to get 10 to 15, but now no one wants their hair cut, as they think men will be told to grow beards like before.”

Sultani shut the shop on August 15 after his mother called him in a panic to tell him Taliban were entering the city. When he reopened last week, one of them came and asked him: “What is this?”

A man paints over murals on a concrete wall along a street in Kabul. Picture: AFP

“He and his men had guns, and I was scared,” said Sultani. “I told him, ‘Mullah sahib, we are sorry. After this we won’t open.’” But he did. “I am the breadwinner for my mum and four younger siblings and have rent to pay for our house and the salon.

“I wish I could leave,” he added. “It feels like all the breath is being sucked out of the city.”

I knew what he meant. From the moment I crossed into Afghanistan last week and saw the white Taliban flag on the border, it felt as if something stultifying had settled across the land.

There was the usual queue of brightly painted lorries waiting to cross into Pakistan, a young girl being dragged from a wheelarch in which she was trying to hide. The long, hazardous road to Kabul, winding through dramatic mountain gorges, had less traffic than usual and a series of checkpoints where Taliban waved us through - more easily, it has to be said, than some of the predatory police checkpoints of the past. They barely glanced at me in the back, shrouded in black niqab and scarf. Only a couple of burnt-out vehicles testified to any resistance on their march to Kabul.

The line of brightly coloured cloths hanging on the roadside overlooking the Kabul river that always tells me we are nearing the outskirts of the capital was gone. As we entered the city at sundown, the wedding halls, which are usually ablaze with coloured lights like ocean liners, were in darkness.

Afghan women take part in a protest march for their rights under the Taliban rule in the downtown area of Kabul. Picture: AFP

Afghanistan was my first assignment in 1988, when the mujahideen were fighting Soviet forces, and in 33 years I have seen it through many dark days - the Soviet occupation, the civil war in the 1990s, the Taliban regime of 1996 to 2001 and then the fear in recent years of suicide attacks every time you left your house. But I had never seen it like this.

In recent years women and girls had thronged the streets in colourful scarves, some in jeans and shirts, often laughing and smiling. Now there were almost no women to be seen, and the handful who had ventured out were clothed in black and hurrying, heads down.

Taliban were everywhere. Drinking cappuccinos. Going shopping at the fake Apple shop. Taking selfies in front of Kabul landmarks or with foreign journalists. Inside the hotel some were playing snooker (they are like children, said one of the receptionists) or helping themselves to the dinner buffet, once again ignoring the “no guns” sign.

Many people I know have fled or are in hiding, fearful of reprisals. Among them are about 50 female MPs, 250 female judges, 300 members of the female orchestra, former scholars on the British Chevening scheme and a rapper.

I have tearful conversations on the phone with some. One judge, 33, told me she and her husband were moving every two or three days, unable to trust even relatives. She had worked on cases of violence against women and convicted a number of Taliban, who have now been released. One in particular, who shot his wife through the heart a month into their marriage in an honour killing after finding she had previously seen someone else, warned the judge: “You convicted us under the laws of the infidel, and once I’m released I will get my revenge.”

She was on the Foreign Office list of vulnerable Afghans, but ten minutes after British embassy officials told her she was booked on a flight and they were sending a car, the bomb went off at Kabul airport and the car never came. Since then her pleas had been ignored, she said, despite Dominic Raab’s pledge to help those remaining. “It’s crystal clear if the Taliban find me they won’t let us live,” she said.

The Taliban say they have brought peace and security to the capital. “You can walk through the streets with 100kg of gold and no one will dare touch you,” claimed Mushtar, a white-bearded man of 55 from Faryab province who said he had been fighting since 1984, first against the Russians and then with the Taliban against other Afghans and later Nato forces. “We are so tired of war,” he said.

As he spoke, a bulldozer was taking down some of the hundreds of unsightly concrete blocks that had lined city streets as protection against suicide bombs. It is a move widely welcomed, as has been the opening of roads that were closed off by warlords, ministers and ambassadors.

Only too aware of doubts that hang over the group from its previous brutal regime that tried to take the country back to medieval times, the Taliban leadership has launched a charm offensive. It insists human rights will be defended and women allowed to work and study. On Friday a cricket match was allowed, something banned last time.

This may well be a cynical move to try to get international support for the regime, which is desperate for aid and the unfreezing of more than dollars 9 billion of government assets, mostly in US banks.

But even if the leadership has adopted a more modern outlook, what of its foot soldiers, who saw themselves as fighting for Islam? Though most people admit things are better than they expected, there are ominous signs.

The Taliban have asked most women to stay at home, aside from those working in hospitals or schools, claiming it is a temporary measure for “security reasons”. That explanation rings hollow for women who remember being told the same thing last time they held power. A professor at a private university in Kabul said they had been called in and told to make preparations for teaching male and female students separately. The Taliban have also announced a ban on music, though on Friday night some of them could be seen dancing to music as gunfire ricocheted across the city to celebrate the capture of a district in Panjshir, the only part of the country not under their rule.

A group has been sent out to paint over murals of women and replace them with slogans from the ministry of information and culture.

Watching were a group of Taliban from Kandahar, including two who had fought the British in Sangin. One of them, Mujahid, 22, said he had joined after losing his father and brothers in a US airstrike. “Just in my family we lost ten people,” he said. Astonished to meet someone from the UK - “I thought we had got rid of you all” - he was intrigued to hear I had been in Helmand with British forces. “Maybe I was shooting at you,” he smiled.

He had never been to Kabul before. “It’s so beautiful,” he said. “People are happy to see us: they invite us to coffee shops, to restaurants. Maybe next you can take us to London.”

Asked about the fears of Taliban rule, he said: “There is bad propaganda against us - we just want a peaceful life for our countrymen, because in all these years we have suffered lots of trauma.”

Many have good reason not to accept such assurances. Sultani, the salon owner, is a Shia from the Hazara minority, which has been repeatedly targeted by Taliban. “I think as soon as they announce their government we will see a different side,” he said. “They are not human. They are very dangerous.” His father, a cleaner in a school, was murdered by the Taliban four years ago.

Educated women are equally fearful. On Friday morning a group of about 20 female civil servants ventured out to protest, marching round the fountain in Pashtunistan Square, holding up printed papers proclaiming: “A society in which women are not active is a dead society.”

Fazillah, 32, a mother of two, said: “We’ve all been told to stay home. The Taliban say they have changed, but did you see any women in their meetings?” The gathering ended shortly after Taliban fired guns to disperse them and detained a male activist accompanying them. But Fazillah said they would not give up. “We don’t care - we are dead in this society anyway,” she said.

Watching in disapproval was a distinguished-looking man in his fifties, with a silk black and white turban, who said he was a doctor at a local hospital. “The West made nothing but chaos in this country,” he said. “There is no single Afghan family who hasn’t tasted the bitterness of the American invasion. In this country we care for our women, clothe them and shelter them,” he added.

The Taliban have met little resistance except in the Panjshir valley, north of Kabul. Some young people show me the old Afghan flag on their phone, saying, “We will resist when the time comes.”

That could be sooner than Taliban supporters believe. One of the poorest nations on earth, entirely dependent on foreign aid and in the grip of drought, Afghanistan was already on the brink of a crisis. Those willing to give the Taliban the benefit of the doubt may feel differently as the economy worsens.

Banks reopened last week but are allowing a maximum withdrawal of dollars 200 a week. “I got married just two months ago and already we are selling my wife’s wedding jewellery to buy food,” one man told me. “I don’t know what will become of us when it runs out.”

The Sunday Times